Position Budget update
What is “Position Budget”?
A “position budget” reflects the annual funding that is needed to cover compensation costs of both filled positions and planned new or vacant positions. If the budget is greater than the actual costs, this will generate “salary savings” (sometimes called “salary accruals”). For example, a Principal Investigator (PI) receives a grant, which offsets some of the cost of their salary that’s covered by a different fund source. This generates salary savings that can be returned to the PI as incentive to continue research or used for other strategic purposes.
How do we track this?
We did not implement position budget when we launched Workday, so many departments are trying to track salary savings using spreadsheets. This is understandably difficult. Right now we’re working on getting position budget data into Workday for FY23. In 2023, we’ll bring on a new tool called Adaptive Planning that will integrate with Workday and can be used to develop annual position budgets (for FY24). Learn more about the Adaptive Planning Project.
What are we doing until Adaptive Planning?
In the meantime, we have 2 workgroups made up of 10 employees each from across WSU working on position budget topics:
- The Position Budget Bridge Period Workgroup is bridging the gap between now and when Adaptive comes online by creating immediate solutions for reconciling salary savings since Workday launched. They’re developing a report in Workday that you can use to calculate salary savings for the bridge period for your area.
- The Position Budget Policy Workgroup is discussing and recommending long-term policy updates related to position budget. They are also working on a report that tracks position budget data by pulling together expenses-to-date and commitments and obligations to show total compensation.
What’s next?
Part of implementing position budgets in Workday will involve collecting position budget data from across the university. We’ve never done this before, so right now we’re figuring out exactly which data to ask for and the best way to load it into Workday. We’ll share more details about this soon.